[HN Gopher] NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on ...
___________________________________________________________________
NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on SpaceX Crew-9
Author : ripjaygn
Score : 297 points
Date : 2024-08-24 17:14 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| ripjaygn wrote:
| Starliner will try to return uncrewed back to earth.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| Knowing Boeing, possibly unscrewed too, haha.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| That's going to be a lot of miles on a self-driving vehicle.
|
| But if there are no further incidents it may not end up with
| such a bad Carfax after all ;)
| nullhole wrote:
| Article on nasa.gov:
|
| "NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without
| Crew"
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-star...
|
| @dang this seems like a better link, could it replace the current
| one?
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Isn't the question of how the astronauts will get back the real
| story here?
| diggan wrote:
| The option was between Starliner or Crew-9, so not using
| Starliner means they'll use Crew-9.
| belter wrote:
| And also, do they have a way to evacuate right now in case of
| emergency?
| ripjaygn wrote:
| They will reconfigure Crew 8 for six occupants for
| emergency evacuation.
| belter wrote:
| So they don't have an evacuation option right now? I
| assumed the problem was the spacesuits are not compatible
| with SpaceX requirements?
|
| https://www.adastraspace.com/p/boeing-spacex-spacesuits-
| comp...
| echoangle wrote:
| The evacuation option right now is Starliner
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm guessing if the ISS was no longer able to sustain
| life support, Starliner would be used. Guaranteed loss of
| life by staying on ISS or having an unknown <100% chance
| of surviving using Starliner, of course it will be
| chanced.
|
| I'm not really sure what point your question is
| attempting to get at
| belter wrote:
| They don't have a way to come back to Earth right now on
| a Spaceship cleared for human flight.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Starliner is the evacuation option right now. It's a
| risky one, but until Crew-8 is reconfigured their only
| option.
| nine_k wrote:
| ISS is huge, and is very unlikely to fail all at once. In
| a case of a catastrophic failure, they could stay in a
| less affected part of the station. All life-critical
| systems on spacecraft are duplicated and triplicated.
| With the current SpaceX launch capabilities, a rescue
| Crew Dragon could arrive within days if not hours.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| They would use Starliner, which was announced a few weeks
| ago.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| The highest quality and most up to date source is EricBerger on
| X https://x.com/SciGuySpace
| _Microft wrote:
| He's also covering space topics for Ars Technica and you can
| certainly expect an article on this in the next few days.
|
| This one is from yesterday, maybe it will receive an update?
| https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/as-nasa-nears-major-
| de...
| somenameforme wrote:
| Here's the link to all of his articles:
| https://arstechnica.com/author/ericberger/
|
| I don't have a positive opinion of Ars, but he's absolutely
| one of the best sources for space news and reporting.
| dylan604 wrote:
| More up to date than the actual press conference currently
| ongoing linked else where in the thread?
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Yes, because NASA and Boeing have been both putting their
| own spin on the things they say. If you read his threads on
| X you can get a good idea of what I'm talking about
| NavinF wrote:
| No, that NASA article is mostly fluff. The original link to the
| ongoing press conference and Eric Berger's summary of it
| (https://x.com/SciGuySpace) are better.
| roughly wrote:
| If we're going to keep Boeing around because it's in the national
| security interest to have an American airplane manufacturer, we
| need to either nationalize it, break it up, or remove the entire
| leadership class. The company exists at this point for the same
| reason that Chase bank does: because they cannot fail, because we
| will not let them. The market structure will not work for this
| company, at least not the way corporate management is done in
| 2024, and if I'm the Air Force or any other branch of the US
| military reliant on Boeing goods, I'm not feeling particularly
| optimistic about my supply of Boeing parts, planes, and armaments
| right now.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| What's the issue with Chase Bank and leadership that's similar
| to Boeing?
| roughly wrote:
| Nothing I'm aware of with Chase's leadership, but they're the
| largest bank in the US by far by AUM, and that's because
| they've been the partner of choice for the FDIC & regulators
| looking to rescue distressed banks. In other words, they're a
| private corporation being used to fill a role the government
| deems essential, and consequently probably the safest place
| on earth to put your money right now, at least with regards
| to the risk of a bank failure.
|
| (As I noted elsewhere, they're treated much differently than
| Boeing, in that they're audited, stress-tested, and generally
| put under the kind of scrutiny warranted by that kind of
| role.)
| misiti3780 wrote:
| 100% agree.
| AnonMO wrote:
| a better bank would have been Wells Fargo. Chase and JPM are
| not in the same category they are profit machines with great
| balance sheets. that's why they swooped in last year during the
| bank crisis and took over some banks.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Wells Fargo is a better example of criminal vs negligent. Has
| Boeing verged into criminal? It's not like they were
| continuously bilking the gov't for all of this, which to me
| keeps them out of criminal. but of course, IANAL
| roughly wrote:
| Yeah, I'm mostly referring to Chase's relationship with the
| Fed, FDIC, and regulators - they're clearly the bank of
| choice for rescuing distressed banks, and they're the largest
| bank in the country by a pretty substantial margin.
|
| You're right about the difference, though - they're stable,
| well-run, and with a solid balance sheet, and it's clear the
| tradeoff for being effectively the Bank of the US is they're
| regulated and stress-tested six ways to Sunday.
|
| If that were the model being applied to Boeing, this'd be a
| different story, but I think there's been a clear decision
| made that Chase is critical infrastructure and should be
| treated & audited like it that hasn't been made about Boeing
| yet.
| protastus wrote:
| This company needs to be audited, starting at the top. Once a
| business is considered critical for natural security (Boeing is
| certainly in this category), it has an obligation to deliver
| with quality and on time. Boeing is failing and needs recovery.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| We should just go ahead and admit that Boeing is a government
| company, and that's what it takes to be one of the big-3 global
| commercial aircraft manufacturers these days (Boeing, Airbus,
| Comac).
|
| Fire all Boeing senior leadership, go through the remainder of
| the company with a fine toothed comb and fire anyone mid-level
| who did anything dumb, then conduct a search to replace
| everyone.
|
| Make the government an explicit stakeholde (25%?) with board
| representation.
|
| Dilute shareholders ($0.50 per dollar?) for investing in a bad
| company, but make any employee shareholders who are still
| employed whole ($1 per $1).
| roughly wrote:
| Yup. There's no market pressure of note on Boeing, otherwise
| they'd be even the slightest bit concerned that their planes
| are falling out of the sky. They exist to turn government
| contracts into stock buybacks.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| It's not true that there's no market pressure on Boeing.
| It's true that Airbus' production capacity limitations have
| blunted the impact of the QA issues on Boeing's financial
| performance, but Boeing is in fact suffering. They've been
| suffering for at least a year (their net profit margin has
| been 0 or lower for the last 4 quarters). Their stock price
| is down ~20% from a year ago, and is down ~35% from their
| high from just before the Air Alaska incidence.
|
| The problem isn't that management assumed that there would
| be no market pressure, the problem is that management
| assumed that engineering and production excellence "just
| happens". They're not dumb enough to believe that shoddy
| products won't effect their financial position - they just
| don't know how to make non-shoddy products while also
| posting decent financials.
| sgc wrote:
| Breaking Boeing up would make it ineffective and likely lead to
| its failure. You could maybe spin off a couple small divisions,
| but not more than that. Nationalization is a non-starter in the
| US - not worth wasting the time and effort to try to make it
| happen. The only real option is to remove the current
| leadership, and place the company into Conservatorship to force
| the new leadership to do the right thing - ideally for at least
| 10 years, but 5 to 7 years would be the more likely political
| outcome of such a move.
|
| I think virtually anybody who wants to see Boeing succeed long
| term, would get on board with this option.
|
| At the same time, the FAA needs to be reformed (and funded) to
| bring it back to the enforcement agency it should be. They got
| into bed with Boeing and their lack of oversight in civilian
| aircraft let the corporate sickness fester and have a safe
| space from which to spread throughout the organization.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| It's not clear to me that splitting up Boeing in
| commercial+business jet, defense, and space would make it
| more ineffective than its current incarnation? Boeing's
| ability to purpose build commercial jet frames for defense
| applications both seems to be... a) not performing well (see
| KC-46), and also b) not a future growth industry with the
| focus shifting to the Indo-Pacific and peer conflict (given
| the vulnerability of these types of platforms).
| sgc wrote:
| It's not a technical problem. It's that they need to stay
| too-big-to-fail, to be able to resist the very aggressive
| competition of other aircraft manufacturers. If they are
| broken up, the smaller companies would not be able to
| compete effectively, and they would also be immediate
| acquisition targets by largely foreign competitors.
|
| I agree with others here that think they need to be a
| quasi-government-run company, but in the US that is done
| through oversight, managing the manager rather than
| stepping into the management role directly. Of course we
| have to absolutely gut that awful management with extreme
| prejudice, to start.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They are a big one but not the only one. We still have
| Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon (now RTX), General
| Dynamics, and maybe others.
|
| Letting them merge with McDonnel-Douglas was a mistake.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Letting them merge? Boeing and McD were essentially forced to
| merge by the Department of Defense post cold-war. So were
| Lockheed and Martin-Marietta, and Northrop with Grumman, etc.
| It was in the national strategic interest, apparently.
| Recommended reading:
| https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-
| how-...
| stackskipton wrote:
| Only Lockheed and Northrop are only ones making military
| aircraft. Raytheon and GD have long stopped.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| We need keep Boeing around so that SpaceX doesn't turn into
| Boeing.
| tim333 wrote:
| There's other competition out there.
| acomjean wrote:
| I dont blame NASA, who knows what else is wrong with that
| capsule.
|
| I feel bad for Boeing. Though to be honest when I worked on a
| project where we were a Boeing sub (defense)we didn't really care
| for them..
|
| Competition is good, and it's sad they can't get their act
| together. Hopefully someone else will, though it will take years.
| The problem with Boeing is they seem to treat all their projects
| like the non competitive defense space..
| diggan wrote:
| > I feel bad for Boeing.
|
| I don't quite understand this. Boeing is a for-profit company
| that chose to try to optimize profits over anything else, and
| now that's biting them in the butt. What's to feel bad about?
| That the executives made the wrong decision?
| mym1990 wrote:
| There are still some, even many, people there that are doing
| their jobs as well as they can at the expense of bad
| executive decisions. I'm sure morale there is not great. I
| don't feel bad for the executives at all, or the company
| really, but there are likely some great people that are just
| getting kicked around based on the crisis of the week.
| diggan wrote:
| But it's exactly the same at
| Facebook/Google/Amazon/Palantir and countless of other
| places, yet people chose to work at those places. Why feel
| bad for them? They've made their choices, and if they're
| not happy with those anymore, they can make new choices.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| >"between 2013 and 2019, Boeing spent 43 billion dollars on
| stock buybacks (a hundred and four per cent of its profits)
| rather than spending resources to address design flaws in
| some of its popular jet models,"
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Not excusing it, but it was very popular pre-pandemic and
| when the pandemic hit, many corps got caught with their
| cash reserve pants down.
|
| Of course we taxpayers (corporate share of tax revenue is
| miniscule compared to 50 years ago) bailed them out...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/business/coronavirus-
| bail...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Coronavirus problems are not Boeing's fault.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| No, but Boeing was going this way before the pandemic. I
| left in 2021 for context.
| mlyle wrote:
| If companies voluntarily choose to operate with lower
| cash reserves and then end up unable to weather hard
| times or make necessary investments in their products, do
| they have any fault for what happens next?
| WalterBright wrote:
| You can't operate a successful company (i.e. with a
| decent ROI) if you're sitting on a Scrooge McDuck cash
| vault.
|
| It wasn't Boeing's fault that the governors shut down the
| economy, something that had never happened before in the
| US.
| mlyle wrote:
| Boeings choice to not sufficiently invest in its core
| products while pumping its stock through buybacks belongs
| solely to Boeing and Boeing's board. The impact to their
| reputation was a predictable and ignored consequence.
|
| In Boeing's case it has very little to do with
| coronavirus, which was just a related example: some
| businesses set aside enough seed corn to survive without
| help, and others didn't.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| Completely agree with you, not only are they for profit but
| they've gotten a lot of help from Uncle Sam along the way
| too!
| vardump wrote:
| I don't think anyone is feeling bad for Boeing's executives.
|
| But can feel sorry for the rest of the organization and the
| subcontractors. Blameless parties are going to suffer a lot
| of collateral damage.
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| Boeing is made up of a lot of people, some who have done
| their absolute best. They don't deserve the failure that
| their leadership caused. I feel bad for Boeing employees, but
| I don't feel bad for their management.
| lysace wrote:
| This trope that anyone who is not a manager is Good and
| anyone who is a manager is Bad rubs me the wrong way.
|
| The reality is often a lot more complex and nuanced.
| scarmig wrote:
| Most of the time, workers and managers are smart, well-
| meaning, and hard-working. Even executives (though as you
| get higher and higher up, you see more and more people
| whose qualification is political skills and not
| expertise).
|
| The issue with Boeing is less any individual and more
| institutional decay. Over time, a spigot of effectively
| unconditional cash corrupts an organization, especially
| once anyone with enough internal weight to fight against
| it is no longer involved in the day-to-day. Give it 20
| years, and SpaceX will be the same way.
| hackernewds wrote:
| It could be individual incompetence as well, why discount
| that and thumb our ears?
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| Because while the issues are serious and many, Boeing is
| still making extremely safe and working airplanes. It's
| impressive and shows that in general, things are going
| right. It doesn't excuse the decay and issues, but this
| isn't a case where everything they do is faulty. they're
| just held to an extremely high bar.
| scarmig wrote:
| Every organization will have incompetent individuals. A
| healthy organization is able to remove them; a typical
| one will blunt their effects; and an unhealthy one will
| allow them to reproduce themselves and seize power.
|
| We want it all to be a matter of just one or two
| incompetent individuals, because then the solution is
| simple. We just need to be aware that incompetent
| individuals exist, and through sheer force of will we can
| prevent them from destroying great things! But a much
| darker possibility is that it's something inherent to
| complex systems. Then, there's nothing to do to escape
| the inevitable cycle. Whatever brilliant schemes we come
| up with are doomed to failure, because the issue isn't
| individuals being stupid but institutional incapability
| to repair itself.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| It doesn't have to be this way. A visionary leader at the
| top can prevent decay over decades (see Apple, Nvidia)
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| Manager's entire job is to provide the organizational
| support and navigate the organizational challenges to
| allow the non-manager employees the space to do their
| job. When we talk about systemic organizational failures,
| managers are the ones that own that problem and are
| accountable for the failures.
|
| Sure, on an individual basis, you have pockets of amazing
| managers that can't overcome organizational inertia. I
| feel for them as well, but when organizational failures
| come into play, I'm certainly taking more pity on the
| employees then the managers.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Managers are responsible for what they manage. If
| something goes wrong, either management caused it, or
| failed to prevent it.
|
| It's possible for the underlings to be good despite bad
| management, but if the underlings are bad that is again a
| consequence of poor management.
|
| The only exception would be deliberate sabotage, which is
| not unknown but incredibly rare.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > This trope that anyone who is not a manager is Good and
| anyone who is a manager is Bad rubs me the wrong way.
|
| It should rub you the wrong way. It denies both the
| agency and the moral obligation of the professionals
| working under the managers.
| 9659 wrote:
| s/some/most/
|
| engineers on the bottom don't care about the politics. they
| design and implement the best they can.
| spacemadness wrote:
| I think they meant they feel bad for the people actually
| doing work, not the people strategizing around wringing out
| the company for short-term profits so they can move on and do
| it again someplace else. At least I really hope that's what
| they meant. You never know on HN.
| diggan wrote:
| But wouldn't you say "I feel bad for the people working at
| X" in that case? And besides, isn't that also a quite
| strange sentiment?
|
| Replace Boeing with Facebook/Google, and it still sounds
| strange to feel bad for the workers at those companies when
| the executives make bad decisions like chasing profits over
| all. I mean, why? People obviously like it there, otherwise
| they wouldn't work there, so why feel bad for them?
| tass wrote:
| There is a lot of pride to be had from seeing something
| you worked on, with your own hands, successfully work -
| look at mission control videos for examples of how
| excited people get. Conversely, if it fails, there's a
| lot of disappointment.
|
| You can't compare something like these massive pieces of
| hardware with people inside failing and taking all your
| work with it, with some software launch that maybe fails
| and takes a couple of bugs to be fixed before relaunch.
|
| The Boeing story is tragic because they were a source of
| pride for America overall, played a huge part in winning
| WW2, made some great technological advances, but
| succumbed to MBAs fleecing all their goodwill. There are
| still world class aerospace engineers working there, and
| sure they could probably get a job somewhere else, but
| they might need to uproot their lives to do so.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > Replace Boeing with Facebook/Google, and it still
| sounds strange to feel bad for the workers at those
| companies when the executives make bad decisions like
| chasing profits over all.
|
| I don't understand this sentiment at all. I know quite a
| few people who worked on the Google Domains team. It was
| a good team, a good product, and it sadly was all blown
| up by some senior executive decision that didn't make any
| sense.
|
| Why can't I feel bad for the workers I knew whose product
| got deleted out from under their feet?? Some of them are
| in the process of getting laid off now!
| mlhpdx wrote:
| Treating Boeing as a single entity is absurd. The people
| there have done great work and their collective contributions
| to the people of the US and world at large is very much
| appreciated by many (including myself).
|
| It is a tragedy that what was even greater has been so badly
| diminished by the greed and incompetence of a few. Hating
| what's happened to Boeing (and perhaps those responsible for
| it) is very different than hating Boeing.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| NASA failed to communicate the seriousness of the issue from
| the beginning. Their press conference mentioned all the work
| they've been doing for MONTHS. Who knew? Everyone thought
| things were 'fine'. Huge huge huge failure by NASA here. They
| can't be trusted.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Example; As late as July 28, NASA flight director Ed Van Cise
| explicitly denied that the Starliner crew was stuck or
| stranded
| <https://x.com/Carbon_Flight/status/1817754775196201035>.
| Even if one quibbles about whether "stranded" applies in this
| situation (I believe that it does <https://np.reddit.com/r/sp
| ace/comments/1ekicol/not_stranded_...>), "stuck" definitely
| does.
| malfist wrote:
| They did communicate. Feel free to peruse the articles from
| Eric Berger on Ars. Lots of good info there
| torginus wrote:
| >the non competitive defense space
|
| I'm still processing that sentence
| johnbellone wrote:
| The Boeing of today is merely a husk of its former glory. If
| the U.S. had another viable domestic airplane manufacturer I
| bet we'd see a lot more pressure on them. That can still
| happen. I hope it does.
| dingaling wrote:
| When Lockheed left the civil aircraft market after the
| TriStar it was largely because the three-way competition with
| Boeing and McD was unviable.
|
| Given that, the subsequent merger of McD with Boeing should
| not have been approved.
| 9659 wrote:
| The commercial aircraft part of McD was dead when the
| merger happened. The had a cash cow called the "MD-80",
| which was a derivative DC-9. That had stopped selling.
|
| Boeing got more value out of the defense part of McD.
| rx_tx wrote:
| A few tidbits/notes I took:
|
| - They'll reconfigure Crew-8 for 6 occupants for contingency evac
| between Starliner undock and Crew-9 arrival.
|
| - Starliner leaving ISS autonomously early September
|
| - Crew 9 launching no later than Sept 24th with 2 crew + 2 empty
| seats
|
| - Crew 9 coming back down in ~Feb 2025
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| Why have Crew 9 up there until February?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| That's the standard crew rotation cycle, and their capsules
| stay as emergency escape vehicles during their stay.
| rx_tx wrote:
| Maybe NASA still wants to get something for the money spent
| launching Crew 9 and get some science done, not just be a
| rescue mission. They don't want to cut that mission short.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sure, if Starliner returns in auto mode successfully, then
| Boeing will be able to save face, and NASA will be able to
| take some stock in that. However, if there is a viable
| alternate option that has a much better track record of
| working, NASA would potentially not survive as an agency if
| there was a catastrophic ending to a Starliner return with
| the astronauts on board.
|
| So from a keep humans safe while still attempting to
| complete the Starliner mission as much as possible, to me
| this is the best solution. In fact, it's kind of bonus for
| Boeing to test the automated return that was not part of
| the original mission. </spinDocter>
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| >- Crew 9 launching no later than Sept 24th with 2 crew + 2
| empty seats
|
| Actually, they said no sooner than Sept 24th.
| rst wrote:
| NASA press conference ongoing:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGOswKRSsHc
|
| (Bottom line: they couldn't tell what was up with the thrusters,
| and didn't want to bet anyone's life on it not getting worse.)
| meroes wrote:
| Didn't they say Teflon was coming off/bubbling and disrupting
| the flow of the thrusters?
| diggan wrote:
| I understood what they were saying about the simulations as
| that the teflon seemed to have expanded slightly and
| disrupting the oxidizers input, meaning the thrusters
| wouldn't work as they should.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Yes, permanent teflon deformation. Problem is, if the
| deformation observed in ground tests was permanent, why did
| the ones in space eventually seem to recover?
|
| That's what's making it harder to trust the thrusters I
| think.
| kotaKat wrote:
| At least this saves Dave Calhoun becoming a vital participant in
| the 2024 Senate hearings on missing astronauts.
| sidcool wrote:
| February 2025!! Whoa.
| umeshunni wrote:
| That's for Crew 9, not the Starliner crew
| Uvix wrote:
| The Starliner crew are staying on the station until then -
| they'll be leaving on Crew 9.
| umeshunni wrote:
| Ah, that makes sense.
| AnonMO wrote:
| Boeing will probably sue the manufacturer of the failed RCS
| thrusters in the next year.
| extropy wrote:
| Possible. Depends how the contract is structured, they may be
| able to claw back some money from Aerojet.
|
| Boeing still takes all the blame.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Embarrassing, NASA has been downplaying the seriousness of this
| for months.
|
| Boeing is cooked. SLS should be scrapped. There has got to be
| consequences for over spending, under delivering, and outright
| failing.
| null0ranje wrote:
| It's a fixed-price contract, so Boeing is out $1.5 billion on
| this.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Starliner is the capsule, SLS is the rocket. SLS [1] is not a
| fixed price contract. The government's dumped tens of
| billions on it already, and continues to throw good money
| after bad. And the "fixed" price contract for Starliner keeps
| getting adjusted with NASA giving them hundreds of millions
| more dollars, allowing them to skip certain qualifying tests,
| and so on.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System
| TMWNN wrote:
| >Embarrassing, NASA has been downplaying the seriousness of
| this for months.
|
| As late as July 28, flight director Ed Van Cise explicitly
| denied that the Starliner crew was stuck or stranded
| <https://x.com/Carbon_Flight/status/1817754775196201035>. Even
| if one quibbles about whether "stranded" applies in this
| situation (I believe that it does <https://np.reddit.com/r/spac
| e/comments/1ekicol/not_stranded_...>), "stuck" definitely does.
| malfist wrote:
| You keep posting this reply everywhere, doesn't make it true.
| They've always had the option of coming down on crew 8, they
| will have the plan of coming down on crew 9. The starliner is
| still functional as well, just the risk is unquantified.
| Remember NASA requires a risk assessment of 1:270 odds to
| proceed. Saying they're not coming back on starliner doesn't
| mean that it's certain death if they do
| TMWNN wrote:
| >You keep posting this reply everywhere, doesn't make it
| true.
|
| Amazing that, even after today's confirmation of what we
| all expected, there are still those in denial.
|
| >They've always had the option of coming down on crew 8
|
| Yes, lashed to a jury-rigged harness in the cargo
| department. Right now NASA is in _de facto_ violation of
| the ironclad rule of always having a seat for everyone
| aboard ISS, and for about three weeks between Crew 8 's
| departure and Crew 9's arrival, the violation will be even
| greater.
|
| >Saying they're not coming back on starliner doesn't mean
| that it's certain death if they do
|
| As I wrote in the link in the comment that you keep seeing
| everywhere but never bothered to read:
|
| >NASA has said that in an emergency the astronauts will use
| Starliner. That is _not_ the same thing as saying that
| using Starliner (whether in an emergency or not) to return
| to earth is as safe as using Soyuz or Crew Dragon, and
| every day the return is delayed (hitting two months very
| shortly) is additional proof of this.
|
| >Put another way, if there is an emergency on ISS right
| now, the two astronauts that flew on Starliner _have_ to
| take Starliner back _because there is no alternative_.
| There are no extra seats on Soyuz or Crew Dragon docked
| there.
|
| and
|
| >In an "ISS explodes tomorrow and there is no Starliner"
| situation, of course Wilmore and Williams will be strapped
| in as tightly as possible as cargo in Crew Dragon. The ride
| might be bumpy, but should be survivable.
|
| >The interesting question is, in an "ISS explodes tomorrow"
| scenario, does the above still occur? Based on all
| available reporting the answer would until very recently
| have been "No; Wilmore and Williams will use Starliner". I
| am no longer sure that this is the case.
|
| Note the last sentence.
| xyst wrote:
| What a massive embarrassment for NASA and Boeing. Boeing name
| used to mean something, now it's joined the rest of the junk in
| this modern world.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| It's hard not to be cynical these days when almost everything
| seems to be "maximize every possible drop of profit at the
| expense of almost anything else." It seems so short-sighted and
| instant-gratification-y.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm waiting for Boeing to change its name to get away from all
| of the negativity associated with Boeing. It's the classic move
| for a company that doesn't really want to change business
| practices, but need to "start over"
| bloopernova wrote:
| Blackwater | Xe Services | Academi
| | Constellis Holdings
|
| I wonder if Boeing will try that? They still seem to be in
| the "deny deny deny, hope people forget" method of operation.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| No, it is not an embarrassment. Space is hard, failures do
| happen often there. There is and will always be a human factor,
| politics and cost optimizations. Despite that they delivered
| people to ISS and have a plan B. It is partial success. The
| problems will eventually be fixed and USA will solidify its
| leadership in space race by having different launch systems and
| never again being dependent on rival powers.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| I think this is much less embarrassing for NASA than Boeing.
| NASA outsources their engineering now, and Boeing was, until
| very recently, a prestigious aeronautical engineering company.
| It's going to be very difficult for the world to adjust to the
| new reality that Boeing is no more. It's an even stranger
| reality that the company which routinely blows up rockets in
| pursuit of what everyone believed was impossible just a few
| years ago is now the clear and obvious choice. I think that's
| the even bigger story here for me: what Musk has done with
| SpaceX is nothing short of revolutionary. In hundreds of years
| people are going to be watching this as a pivotal moment in
| human development:
| https://youtu.be/sf4qRY3h_eo?si=fAhcunCLHY803wn7&t=454
|
| Look at this shit. Just look at it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AXnMlxK22A
| WalterBright wrote:
| NASA has always outsourced their engineering to aerospace
| companies.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| It's amazing how many people, whether sympathetic to SpaceX
| or not, believe that NASA built its previous spacecraft in-
| house or something. The main differences between Commercial
| Crew and previous US manned space programs are that a) two
| different vehicles were built, not one, and b) NASA does
| not own or operate the vehicles; their builders do.
| Everything else is the same: NASA provided specifications
| for what it wanted in a manned spacecraft capable of
| reliably carrying people to ISS, various companies bid
| based on the specifications--their designs varying greatly
| from one another--and NASA chose the winning bids.
| rootbear wrote:
| I grew up in Huntsville, AL, in the 60s and the space
| program was the main business of the city. My father worked
| for Chrysler Corp. on the Saturn 1B, and most of our
| neighbors worked for either NASA or one of the many
| contractors.
| marssaxman wrote:
| > Look at this shit. Just look at it:
|
| Thanks for the link. That is truly amazing to watch!
| misiti3780 wrote:
| imagine if you could go back in the past 20 years and show
| someone that video. it's science fiction level crazy. im
| happy and proud that happened in the US and not china or
| russia, everyone else should be too
| ren_engineer wrote:
| >and Boeing was, until very recently, a prestigious
| aeronautical engineering company
|
| what do you define as "recently"? This Boeing/lockheed
| project has been a taxpayer funded disaster for over a decade
| and this is just the obvious end result. Boeing managed to
| siphon billions of tax dollars in the meantime
| 404mm wrote:
| Why for NASA?
|
| Boeing is the one who (yet again) let everyone down. First by
| making another unreliable vehicle, then by downplaying the
| seriousness.
| stan_kirdey wrote:
| does the crew get paid overtime if they were to stay until Feb?
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| According to a report I read, their extra time is being
| compensated by Boeing with $50 gift cards for Red Lobster.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| This is evidence of the utter failure of constantly pumping money
| into a dated cartel of prime contractors that have no incentive
| to do better. I am very thankful we have Elon Musk to be bold
| enough to enter this impossibly capital heavy market and show a
| better way. I hope this is the start of a reset on how taxes are
| funneled to government contractors.
| paxys wrote:
| It's crazy to me that while we've been fantasizing about lunar
| bases, Mars settlements, asteroid mining and colony ships, now,
| 60+ years after our "space" era started, we still haven't figured
| out how to get a single person to low Earth orbit and back in a
| safe and cost efficient way. We all need a collective reality
| check on our spacefaring hopes.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| Elon Musk has been doing what he does best, selling people on
| unrealistic pipe dreams.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Looks to me like Musk is delivering on his "pipe dreams".
| panick21_ wrote:
| SpaceX already regularly brings people to LEO and back
| reliabily. And they are working on the moon. Boieng not being
| able to do it isnt relevant.
| static_motion wrote:
| I'm all for holding him accountable to his outlandishly
| unrealistic claims, but he and the entire SpaceX team are
| wholly responsible for the biggest advancements and
| innovations in space explorations since the space race.
| Credit where credit is due.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| What is SpaceX doing that the Apollo project (or the
| Soviets, for that matter) wasn't doing 50 years ago. Re-
| usable booster stages is all I can really think of.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Doing it for 10% of the cost.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Costs always come down as technologies mature.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's 10% of NASA's current costs. Costs for NASA never
| came down.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| OK granted. NASA and legacy aerospace contractors were
| milking a cash cow and never thought they would face a
| new competitor.
|
| But I was more thinking of fundamental capabilites. We
| (USA and USSR) have had crewed low-orbit space stations
| since the 1970s and have been sending astronauts to and
| from them since then. We sent probes to Mars and Venus
| and other planets in the 1970s. The Voyagers were
| launched in 1977. The stuff we're capable of doing today
| has not really advanced.
| WalterBright wrote:
| SpaceX's rockets are a big advance.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Space is a perfect example that this isn't true. It kept
| going up and up with NASA/Boeing. The Space Shuttle ended
| up costing, in total, $2.2 billion per launch! [1] The
| SLS, if it ever finishes, was expected to cost more than
| $2 billion per launch [2], and that's before we went into
| inflation land. Add the inflation and the fact that
| expected costs tend to be dwarfed by real costs, and it's
| easy to see it going for $3+ billion per launch.
|
| By contrast a Falcon 9 costs $0.07 billion per launch.
| And the entire goal of the Starship is to send that cost
| down another order of magnitude. Without significant
| competition + price sensitive market, the only way costs
| come down is if you have an ideologically motivated
| player. And it's fortunate that we have exactly that with
| SpaceX.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Spac
| e_Shuttle...
|
| [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System
| exe34 wrote:
| SpaceX is also doing right now what Apollo and the
| Soviets are not doing right now. That's very important,
| because they are using modern materials and manufacturing
| techniques and developing new concepts. If SpaceX (and
| soon their competitors, hopefully) manage to keep
| themselves in business (and they might, because of the
| profit motive, which is enduring, rather than national
| pride, which comes and goes), there's a fair chance our
| species might bootstrap its way out of the ancestral
| gravity well this time around.
| biscottigelato wrote:
| Profit has not been the goal. If profit is the goal,
| one'd start another eyeball catching internet
| application. As the joke goes, the way to make a small
| fortune in space, is to start with a big fortune. SpaceX
| is the exception, not the norm. It worked only because of
| the unwavering, perhaps maniacal drive of one man. The
| man being hated on all over the place here that shall not
| be named.
|
| I'd suspect the space industry will slow down drastically
| again if somehow that man stops putting space as a
| priority (or at least one of his priorities). Currently I
| don't think there's any one or company that is able to
| push the envelope AND still turn an operational profit at
| the same time. Even Starship program is not. Making it
| work is the exception, not some inevitable norm as others
| are making it as. Aka - "just because of government
| money".
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| Lowering the cost of mass to orbit by a factor of 100+,
| oh is that all?
|
| What did Henry Ford do really for cars, the assembly line
| is all I can think of.
| static_motion wrote:
| Beyond the cost aspect that other commenters have
| referred to, they're evolving tech. They're the first
| ones to have a working full-flow staged combustion cycle
| rocket engine (the Raptor, currently used in the Starship
| prototypes), something the Soviets tried before and
| failed. Their Dragon capsule was also a gigantic
| technological leap relative to the admittedly tried-and-
| true Soyuz, and it also looks far more comfortable for
| astronauts than the Soyuz does.
| WalterBright wrote:
| People thought the Wright Brothers were crazy, too.
|
| Innovators are often dismissed as having outlandish,
| unrealistic claims. And then they succeed.
|
| And, frankly, how are you going to hold him "accountable"?
| It's his and his investors' money he's spending. They know
| what they signed up for.
|
| P.S. I own a bit of Tesla and SpaceX stock. It could go to
| zero, and I'm still happy to have a "piece" of what Musk is
| accomplishing.
|
| The only thing I'm mad about is I owned some Twitter stock,
| but when Musk bought it I was cashed out against my
| desires. Though I do understand Musk wanting to run Twitter
| as he saw fit rather than having to listen to activist
| shareholders.
|
| Musk is one of, it not the, greatest entrepreneur in
| American history.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > The only thing I'm mad about is I owned some Twitter
| stock, but when Musk bought it I was cashed out against
| my desires.
|
| You got lucky. Twitter's revenue is down 80% since it
| went private, and your shares would correspondingly be
| worth a tiny fraction of what they were originally worth
| if you still owned them. Musk has succeeded with other
| companies but his Twitter acquisition has been a total
| failure. He simply doesn't understand how to run a social
| networking company.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm a long term investor, and I wouldn't bet against Musk
| long term.
|
| > Twitter's revenue is down 80% since it went private
|
| Twitter's costs are down 80%, too. I wouldn't be
| surprised if X was currently profitable, though since it
| is privately held, who know.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| The point is, the stock would likely be down at least 5X,
| so if you wanted to be a long-term investor, you could
| take the cash that was forcefully cashed out and re-buy
| in now and get over 5X the share of the company. Selling
| high and re-buying in low is a very good strategy if you
| can actually do it, and you have the opportunity to do
| it!
|
| But you certainly don't want to be the bagholder who held
| it when it was high (the price Elon was willing to pay
| for it) and then rode it all the way down to the bottom
| when it cratered.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've held many of bags. Some of them all the way to a
| smoking hole in the ground. But several of the bags
| turned out to be winners that far outstripped the losses.
|
| I prefer to invest in the management of a company, rather
| than the financials. I'm willing to see them through the
| bad times if I believe they're on the right track. I've
| been a patient investor of Intel since the 90s. But a
| couple months ago, I finally gave up and sold it. It
| pained me a great deal to do so, but Intel just seems to
| have lost its mojo.
|
| Sure, my Twitter stock may have tanked under Musk. But I
| am willing to be patient with him.
|
| Let's say I invest in 10 stocks, and hold, hold, hold. 3
| of them go to zero. 3 do modestly ok. 3 do well. 1 goes
| up a hundred fold. The other 9 are irrelevant.
| 9659 wrote:
| And thus WalterBright describes to us how VC's make
| money... risk and reward.
|
| (Hi Walter. Love your posts...)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Thank you kindly!
|
| My investment strategy is not advocated by any investment
| advice I've ever seen.
| mlyle wrote:
| Twitter is loaded up with a ridiculous amount of debt
| from the transaction. Those costs are not down.
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| I do not know how well X is doing as a business, but Musk
| buying Twitter has certainly helped to wrest it out of
| the hands of the left and to shift the Overton window. It
| could well be that to Musk, the political impact is well
| worth billions of dollars.
| YarickR2 wrote:
| Biggest advancements ? Give me a break. Voyagers, Hubble,
| ISS, James Webb, upcoming Europa mission - SpaceX has
| nothing on that level of sophistication and cooperation
| between dozens of countries. I'm very much fond of SpaceX,
| but giving Elon too much credit does not feel right .
| init2null wrote:
| Biggest advancements in launch technology would surely be
| correct. Scientific research isn't in their domain and
| should never be. There's just too much political
| influence there.
| brainphreeze wrote:
| We've been dreaming of space travel since long before Elon
| was born. The hate people have for Elon is absolutely wild.
| option wrote:
| losers hate successful people. it is called jealousy, and
| sadly a part of human nature
| option wrote:
| look at track record. Not at tweets. He has delivered more
| than anyone else. By far and in several areas.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I follow Musk on twitter. I usually get a chuckle from his
| tweets. It's nice to see a major figure speak his mind
| rather than the careful pablum filtered through a PR
| department and read off a teleprompter.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Musk is the epitome of "never meet your idols"
| dbg31415 wrote:
| It's hard to have any respect for a racist. Y'know? For
| me, that's all it comes down to. If you can say, "I'm ok
| with racism as long as he delivers!" I guess that case
| can be made. But 2024... how does Musk still not have the
| judgement to just keep his mouth shut when he doesn't
| have something nice to say?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I hear "racist" bandied about so often it has lost its
| meaning.
|
| > how does Musk still not have the judgement to just keep
| his mouth shut when he doesn't have something nice to
| say?
|
| I'm old, and no longer care what people say. It's what
| they do that matters.
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| I can't think of anything Musk has said that is racist.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I doubt there is a single person on the national stage
| who hasn't been called a racist.
| jcranmer wrote:
| I don't think he has said anything outright. But he has
| endorsed (coded) antisemitic tweets, he has directly
| espoused transphobia, and his companies have lost a few
| lawsuits alleging racist working conditions.
|
| I don't think he himself is racist, but he seems to enjoy
| hanging out with a lot of racists, and he gives me vibes
| that he thinks anti-racism is more of a problem than
| racism.
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| It is true that Musk endorsed a post which said that
| Jewish communities have been endorsing anti-white hatred.
|
| There is no doubt that one can easily find many
| individual Jews, and even groups of Jews, who have
| endorsed anti-white hatred. However, Jews are prominent
| in all parts of the political spectrum due probably
| mainly to their high average level of intellectual
| ability, so basically anyone could find prominent Jews
| among their political opponents no matter what sort of
| politics one has. Some of the most prominent figures who
| are generally considered far-right in today's Western
| Overton window, and most definitely are not anti-white,
| are Jewish. For example, David Horowitz, Curtis Yarvin,
| Costin Alamariu, and many others. Then there is Israel,
| which in some ways is far-right by modern US standards,
| and is a place where I imagine the majority of the
| population both consider themselves white and are not
| anti-white in the slightest, rather the opposite. The
| idea that entire broad communities of Jews promote anti-
| white hatred is not supportable by reality as far as I
| can tell.
|
| I forgot about that endorsement of his. You make a good
| point. I am not sure that his endorsement was just a case
| of misunderstanding on his part rather than revealing a
| deeper racist sentiment. It could go either way. It is
| possible that he was just sloppy and interpreted "Jewish
| communities" to mean "certain groups of Jews", which is
| what he tried to say when he backtracked from his
| endorsement later, and it is also possible that he
| actually dislikes Jewish people in general. But I agree
| that it is not unlikely that he has at least some
| underlying anti-Jewish sentiment.
|
| Funnily, I notice that many people who have anti-Jewish
| sentiment misunderstand what is typically happening when
| individual Jews express anti-white sentiment. Usually
| what is happening in such cases is that the person
| considers himself both white and Jewish, so when he
| expresses anti-white sentiment it is not as a Jewish
| person hating on whites, it is actually as a self-hating
| white hating on whites. I would not be surprised if
| Jewish whites in the US are more likely to express anti-
| white sentiment than non-Jewish whites are, since Jewish
| people in the US tend to be leftist and being a self-
| hating white person is a very common characteristic of
| leftist whites, but that does not mean that communities
| of Jews are anti-white unless you use the word
| "communities" in a rather non-standard way.
|
| As far as transphobia goes, I am not so sure. Musk seems
| to be a bad father to his trans child, but I cannot think
| off the top of my head of any transphobic things that he
| has said, unless you think that it is transphobic to not
| consider a trans woman a woman. Which I do not consider
| transphobic at all. But I might not be aware of some of
| his statements.
| option wrote:
| I get a laugh too. Also, I love what he has done with
| Twitter, though name change to X was stupid.
| trothamel wrote:
| Given that SpaceX is about to launch four people on what is
| more-or-less a joyride (Polaris Dawn), it's really only the
| government and boeing that seem to be having problems.
| armada651 wrote:
| > it's really only the government and boeing that seem to be
| having problems.
|
| As we've seen these past few years, Boeing is perfectly
| capable of royally screwing things up on its own without the
| government's involvement.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| Right, the public-sector government becomes afraid to take
| risks for political reasons. On the other hand, the
| publicly traded private sector over-optimizes for
| shareholder value, putting the cart of gold before the
| horse; Boeing.
|
| SpaceX remains a private company solely focused on their
| mission undeterred by outside influence which allows
| engineers the space to do what they do best.
|
| There's a difference and anything that's truly critical to
| our lives or human livelihood should consider delisting.
| Once shareholders demand your company to stray from
| excellence and quality in the name of raising the bottom
| line, it's time to give it a hard look.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Private companies have shareholders as well.
| vessenes wrote:
| As a (very) small shareholder in SpaceX, I can tell you,
| it's Elon (and Gwynne's) game, full stop. I would be very
| surprised to learn an investor has even a tiny bit of
| influence at SpaceX.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The problem isn't government meddling, but the government
| creating perverse incentives. Boeing has an extremely
| strong relationship with the government, which means they
| get sent endless billions of dollars with quality being
| only a distant concern. Because it's not like Congress
| cares about space - NASA is just seen as a convenient
| jobs/pork medium. So long as money gets redirected to the
| right people, they're happy. And so maintaining this
| relationship, and milking it for all it's worth, becomes
| much more profitable and reliable than trying to compete,
| innovate, and bring down prices. On the contrary, high
| prices and long development times just drive even more
| profit. Most of their contracts have been cost plus where
| the government pays for all costs and then gives them a fat
| chunk of profit on top. Even the fixed price contracts tend
| to end up getting 'adjusted' over time.
|
| Any company solely motivated by profit would probably be
| destroyed in this system, because the incentives created do
| not reward competence.
| baseballdork wrote:
| The government (NASA with their commercial space effort) is
| the reason there's a SpaceX and a dragon to be available as
| backup. The government seems to be doing alright here.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| SpaceX exists _because_ of that government 's significant
| funding of the company and the prescient decision to award
| multiple (fixed-price!) Commercial Cargo/Crew contracts.
| hackernewds wrote:
| and the government should continue to fund private
| enterprise for innovation.
|
| much of the billions for a charger network for EVs has made
| <10 chargers, they could have provided that to Tesla.
| similarly the EV tax credits provided to private companies
| has fueled EV proliferation
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The charger thing is misleading. The money hasn't been
| spent yet, it goes to states to use, and the goal is
| 2030.
|
| https://www.factcheck.org/2024/08/trump-misleads-on-the-
| cost...
|
| > Just looking at the $5 billion program dedicated to
| building charging stations along major highways, Nigro
| said updated data from 10 states shows the government's
| share of building each port is $150,000, on average. That
| works out to more than 30,000 ports and as many as 7,500
| stations, assuming each has four ports (Nigro said the
| station number will likely be lower, since many stations
| will have more ports). Even more charging stations and
| ports can be built with the other $2.5 billion.
|
| They did Tesla an _enormous_ favor by pushing the other
| car manufacturers to adopt their standard. A good use of
| government power, IMO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nort
| h_American_Charging_Standa...
| avsteele wrote:
| 2030 for 500K chargers is just separate political goal,
| it isn't connected to the $7.5B allocated by the bill.
|
| The bill allocates $7.5B over 5 years. He said most will
| be coming online 2027+ but seemed to admit that the
| expectation was for more to be online by now. While I
| agree the "9 stations for $7.5B" there are reasonable
| concerns here that the money will be well-spent. I can't
| even find anything on how much has been actually
| allocated to far and how many chargers are expected.
|
| https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/02_22_24_Letter_to_
| Sec...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 2030 for 500K chargers is just separate political goal,
| it isn't connected to the $7.5B allocated by the bill.
|
| Yes, it is.
| https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-
| charger... "Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure
| package into law in 2021 with $7.5 billion specifically
| directed toward EV chargers, with an eye toward achieving
| his goal of building 500,000 chargers in the United
| States by 2030."
|
| > The bill allocates $7.5B over 5 years.
|
| Yes, to hand out to the states. Who then get to spend it
| on projects. Allocation is the _start_ of the project,
| not the end.
|
| https://afdc.energy.gov/laws/12744
|
| "FHWA must distribute the NEVI Program Formula Program
| funds made available each fiscal year (FY) through FY
| 2026, so that each state receives an amount equal to the
| state FHWA funding formula determined by 23 U.S. Code
| 104. To receive funding, states must submit plans to the
| FHWA and the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation
| for review and public posting annually, describing how
| the state intends to distribute NEVI funds. The FHWA
| announced approval of all initial state plans on
| September 27, 2022, and FY2024 plans were approved in
| 2023."
|
| > https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/02_22_24_Letter_t
| o_Sec...
|
| You'll find me fairly unconvinced by a letter from
| Republican House Representatives to Biden. (You probably
| would find a letter from Democratic reps to Trump
| similarly useless as evidence.)
| misiti3780 wrote:
| How does the government determine where to put all these
| new chargers?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The dataset is publicly available.
| https://data.nrel.gov/submissions/214
|
| https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2023/building-
| the-2030-nat...
| seo-speedwagon wrote:
| Turning Elon Musk into the richest person on earth was a
| US government project on the same kind of scale as the
| TVA and Apollo program. It's actually kinda funny when
| you think about it.
| vessenes wrote:
| This is reductive, in the extreme, to the point of being
| incorrect. SpaceX had to sue to win its first contracts,
| Tesla was actively cut out of Biden administration EV
| programs and awards. Whatever success they've had, they
| have absolutely earned.
| NavinF wrote:
| > Tesla was actively cut out of Biden administration EV
| programs and awards
|
| Incidentally this was the inception of the Tech Right.
| Before that, Elon exclusively voted for Democrats.
|
| I didn't realize the impact back then:
| https://x.com/mualphaxi/status/1817562306764566824
| hereme888 wrote:
| All space companies exist for that reason. Especially
| Boeing.
|
| SpaceX just happens to be the best in every aspect.
| manquer wrote:
| It is undeniable that NASA/NROL/USAF contracts and support
| benefited spaceX especially early on .
|
| However their commercial launch business is still
| considerably larger than what US gov gives them and always
| has been , it is possible and quite likely they would have
| existed as a successful commercial space launch company
| without government contracts , albeit smaller and perhaps
| slower to reach many milestones .
|
| I can also argue reasonably that many things US government
| wants is not useful (or simply restricted) for other
| customers and building those features were and are a
| distraction.
|
| No different for a startup to have a very large customer
| who has all sorts of customization needs that no other
| customer will focusing on that can kill the company as ULA
| and Boeing space are feeling today.
|
| SpaceX is successful because they don't need government
| support not because of it, they can build starship without
| waiting for a nasa mission and not even using VC money but
| just money from their revenues .
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > it is possible and quite likely they would have existed
| as a successful commercial space launch company without
| government contracts...
|
| Even Musk doesn't make that claim.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/29/elon-musk-9-years-ago-
| spacex...
|
| ""I messed up the first three launches. The first three
| launches failed. And fortunately the fourth launch, which
| was, that was the last money that we had for Falcon 1.
| That fourth launch worked. Or it would have been -- that
| would have been it for SpaceX. But fate liked us that
| day. So, the fourth launch worked," says Musk."
|
| Flights one, two, and three all involved government
| funding (Air Force and DARPA payloads).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RatSat#Aftermath
|
| "Even though SpaceX finally has achieved a successful
| orbital flight, Musk only has $30 million left and was
| unable to support both SpaceX and Tesla for two months.
| Contrary to popular belief, Falcon 1's flight 4 did not
| directly lead to more customer contracts. Through 2008,
| SpaceX launch manifest at the time only consisted of
| RazakSAT. Rather, it was NASA's Commercial Orbital
| Transportation Services and subsequent Commercial
| Resupply Services contracts that provided SpaceX much-
| needed fund to save it from bankruptcy."
| avmich wrote:
| Don't forget SpaceX was the first private company which
| achieved orbit without external money, and did that for
| awfully less money than e.g. Air Force thought possible.
|
| Give the credit where it's due, as they say.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Don't forget SpaceX was the first private company which
| achieved orbit without external money...
|
| No; SpaceX received DARPA (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/cita
| tions/20060048219/downloads/20...), Air Force
| (https://www.space.com/2196-spacex-inaugural-
| falcon-1-rocket-...), and NASA funding (COTS, in 2006)
| prior to their first orbital success with Falcon 1.
| verzali wrote:
| A big chunk of Starship funding is coming from NASA for
| the Artemis HLS.
| avmich wrote:
| https://spacenews.com/nasa-awards-spacex-1-15-billion-
| contra...
|
| So, two flights to the Moon - ~$4B. SpaceX already spent
| around that on the developments in Boca Chica, each
| flight - expendable - is estimated at $0.1B, we already
| had 4 and they are surely more costly. We still have to
| have 2 HLS to fly and 20-30 Starship flights to refuel
| them, and that's the lower bound in expenses.
|
| Big chunk, likely. But definitely not nearly all the
| money.
| delichon wrote:
| It'll include the first commercial space walk ever. Calling
| that a joy-ride either trivializes an epic accomplishment or
| correctly describes a joy-ride of the gods. Helios' daily
| commute, but faster.
| 9659 wrote:
| SpaceX will lose a vehicle. Not a question of if, rather one
| of when.
|
| relax! i am not saying Elon isn't the greatest engineer ever,
| and SpaceX is not a great company.
|
| space flight is a dangerous business.
| lolinder wrote:
| OceanGate launched three people on a joyride to the bottom of
| the ocean and the sub imploded.
|
| Rich people being willing to spend buckets of money on an
| experience is not evidence that it is "safe" or "cost
| effective", it's just evidence that there are people in the
| world with more money than they know what to do with.
| zpeti wrote:
| Does spacex not exist in your world or what?
| option wrote:
| we need more than one spacex.
| exe34 wrote:
| That appears to be answering a question orthogonal to:
|
| > we still haven't figured out how to get a single person
| to low Earth orbit and back in a safe and cost efficient
| way
| zpeti wrote:
| We have Ariane space, rocket lab, blue origin.
|
| We need more than one musk. Unfortunately that's like one
| in a century.
| coryrc wrote:
| Even Musk isn't Musk anymore.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| He does not have a personally consistent track record but
| his company SpaceX seems to be executing just as good if
| not even better than it ever has.
| metabagel wrote:
| It's all good until he has his Spacex Cybertruck moment.
| buildsjets wrote:
| He's our generation's Howard Hughes. One Ket trip away
| from becoming a recluse, shuffling around with kleenex
| boxes for slippers muttering about being unclean and
| denouncing conspiracies against him.
| zpeti wrote:
| > One Ket trip away from becoming a recluse
|
| This was literally debunked by nasa but I'm so glad HN is
| so captured by anti musk narratives it's impossible to
| post anything good about him with getting downvoted.
|
| Pretty sad state of affairs.
| Eggpants wrote:
| Musk almost bankrupted both SpaceX and Tesla, He was more
| lucky than good.
| tensor wrote:
| I see you mistyped Shotwell.
| option wrote:
| she is good too. but musk did 0->1 work. She did
| everything else
| biscottigelato wrote:
| I agree. You are free to start one too~
| metabagel wrote:
| It helps to inherit wealth.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| We get people to and from low earth orbit safely and (relative
| to the 60's) cost efficiently all the time. One failure isn't
| an indictment of the whole industry, any more than one broken
| down car negates how much better cars are today than in the
| past.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| And it wasn't even a real failure; they contractually have to
| provide something like a 1 in 200 chance of failure or
| better, and in the state the vehicle is in they haven't or
| can't prove that they're meeting that safety margin, so NASA
| is choosing to go with an option that does have that safety
| margin. That's it. If they were to come down in it anyways
| there's still likely a 1% or less chance of failure.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I fully agree. Personally I don't think we'll ever have an
| extended manned presence anywhere farther away than the Moon.
| We might visit Mars in the next century, maybe, but a colony
| surviving there is pure fantasy.
| diggan wrote:
| It's been 63 years ago since the first human visited the
| orbit around earth. Since then, development and research
| happens faster and faster. We now even have commercial
| companies who are developing space crafts for humans.
|
| I don't think we've seen even the beginning of how things
| will unfold. Just 100 years will render a huge difference
| from today, and today we're already doing things that were
| unthinkable ~20 years ago (like reusable rockets).
| garaetjjte wrote:
| In other words, we are almost as far away from moon
| landings as they were from Wright brothers first flight.
| Not particularly optimistic.
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| Just a couple hundred years ago, Settlers who risked
| their lives and spent several months on cutting edge
| technology (aka wooden sail boats) to find "new" land
| would like to have a word.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Commercial space flight will become mainstream as soon as
| it becomes viable to profit from it. Probably via asteroid
| or moon mining. At that point motivation to be in space
| will hit its peak. Let's not forget why humans went to
| orbit and the moon in the first place.
| monooso wrote:
| > Let's not forget why humans went into orbit and the
| moon in the first place.
|
| Political propaganda?
| MGRandom wrote:
| manifesting as real motivation
| maxerickson wrote:
| Why are we gonna sustain a presence on the moon?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| We might. I'm not saying we will. Neither place is
| habitable without exhorbitant levels of support and
| expense, but the moon is far closer.
| zo1 wrote:
| We have to have a collective look at what 1st-world
| governments, the media, and most "ordinary" people have been
| focusing on since the late 60's.
|
| The world is not mobilizing towards these big "civilization
| advancing" goals, we're all just faffing about solving the next
| tiny little thing infront of our faces. That plus we're
| breeding mediocrity and not promoting excellence through
| meritocracy. This is purely cultural, and it's right infront of
| us every day to see and participate in (or not).
| rockemsockem wrote:
| We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and
| lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when
| SpaceX started picking up where they left off.
|
| Documentation and old drawings, often lacking implementation
| details, can only take you so far
|
| There's no big secret, if we do a thing a lot we will be able
| to do it consistently and reliably. Boeing has not done a lot
| of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent
| a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
|
| Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building
| lots of spacecraft.
| golergka wrote:
| One could argue that shuttle program didn't end up as
| successful as was originally hoped, but it is certainly
| "serious space development".
| eigenman wrote:
| The first space shuttle prototype (Enterprise) started
| construction in 1974. The first shuttle launched in 1981.
| To the best of my knowledge, there were no major upgrades
| to the design over its career, save avionics. So even
| though the space shuttle was "serious space development,"
| it's been a long time since a new human rated vehicle has
| been designed.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| It was also initially designed to be able to have nuclear
| thermal propulsion engines installed in later iterations,
| but that got scrapped.
| verzali wrote:
| Well, Orion was developed.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Yes, also there's a world of difference between a single
| extremely hard to repeat mission whose only purpose was to
| win the race to the Moon at any cost for reasons that had
| more to do with politics than engineering (not to dismiss
| the huge engineering accomplishments, my point should be
| clear) and something whose plan is to send stuff in orbit
| every week and potentially people every month with the goal
| to do the same on the Moon very soon and Mars in less than
| a couple decades. The great accomplishment today isn't
| reaching a higher orbit than in the 60s, but doing the same
| every damn month, with significant cargo capabilities, and
| safely. One can't build a Moon base by sending up there a
| bag of screws every six months.
| avar wrote:
| The total cost of the shuttle was around $200 billion. A
| Saturn V launch was around $1.2 billion (today's
| dollars).
|
| The Saturn V could get 44.5 tons to the moon.
|
| So instead of the shuttle program we could have had
| whatever amount of moon base you'd get with just under
| 7500 tons on the moon.
|
| And that's assuming a very expensive Saturn V, in reality
| the system would have become cheaper over time due to
| optimization and amortization.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| What do you mean a "single mission", Apollo put
| astronauts on the moon 6 times and orbited it another 2
| times.
|
| You learn to do things better by doing it repeatedly. The
| best way to build up to weekly launches is to do it more
| and more and more often, which is exactly what SpaceX has
| done.
|
| Stopping the funding that NASA was getting at the time is
| the reason we lost those institutional muscles and
| stopped building them up.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Apollo's single mission was "get to the moon", which it
| performed admirably more than once. Skylab was an attempt
| at a secondary mission; others were canceled in early
| planning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Post-
| Apollo_proposal).
| squarefoot wrote:
| > What do you mean a "single mission", Apollo put
| astronauts on the moon 6 times and orbited it another 2
| times.
|
| Possible bad wording on my part. I meant that the cost
| was hardly sustainable in a long run, so that once it was
| clear that the US had won the race to the Moon, the lack
| of significant incentives doomed the project because of
| high cost compared to the return. Back then there was no
| or very little interest in placing commercial satellites
| in orbit and nobody cared about Mars. The shuttle was
| different as it served as a lab and carrier to put
| satellites in orbit, and more importantly (replying also
| to avar here) disasters aside one would still have the
| shuttle returning after each launch, while every single
| Saturn V had to be rebuilt. I believe the move to a
| reusable carrier was obligatory to make short term
| launches feasible economically, which is what the Shuttle
| started and now SpaceX is continuing.
| avar wrote:
| The shuttle could get 24 tons to orbit, Saturn V could
| deliver 130 tons.
|
| The per launch cost was the same when dividing the
| overall cost by the number of launches. Saturn V launched
| 13 times, the shuttle 135 times.
|
| There's just no way to rationalize the whole project not
| being a terrible idea from beginning to end.
| mppm wrote:
| "Not as successful as was originally hoped" is quite an
| understatement. The program missed all of its economical
| and operational targets (reliability, cost per kg in orbit,
| launch frequency) by a factor of _one hundred_. It was
| supposed to usher in a new era of scientific, commercial
| and civilian spaceflight, and competing programs were
| cancelled and deprioritized because they were about to be
| obsoleted by this amazing new reusable space lauch system.
| What it ended up being, instead, was an epic exercise in
| space budget whoring, which continues to this day with the
| Artemis program that insists on "reusing" Space Shuttle
| derived hardware for that exact reason.
| avar wrote:
| It spent way more money than initially planned, while
| doing so consistently over decades, and in all the right
| congressional districts.
|
| It was wildly successful.
|
| You're just under the mistaken impression that the goal
| was to go to space cheaply or whatever.
|
| But the success of the shuttle program pales in
| comparison to the SLS and Artemis.
|
| Now they're spending more money in all the right places,
| without that pesky distraction of launching the thing
| into space.
| avmich wrote:
| > You're just under the mistaken impression that the goal
| was to go to space cheaply or whatever.
|
| You're way off in the wonderland considering the goals
| and achievements. Just remember who's the actual goal
| setter is. Don't fool yourself.
| jwells89 wrote:
| The shuttle program had several problems, but perhaps the
| biggest was something of a "design by committee" issue. Too
| many interested parties wanted it to do too many things,
| making it somewhere between bad and mediocre at all of
| them, to say nothing of the costs.
|
| To build reliable, economical rockets and spacecraft (at
| least those burdened with the task of escaping Earth's
| gravity well), you need to be able to intensely specialize
| and streamline them to the greatest degree possible, with
| what complexity remains pulling its own weight several
| times over. They need to be really good at one thing, with
| any other use cases coming as a bonus.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| IMO the shuttle program did a decent job of preserving
| American human-spaceflight know-how, especially when
| measured against what it was feasible to accomplish at the
| time.
|
| The true problem is that the US government stopped funding
| space in a serious way and so NASA did not continue pushing
| the envelope at the rate they did before. We've had some
| pretty great robotic missions in that time though.
| avmich wrote:
| > Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are
| building lots of spacecraft.
|
| I wouldn't say they do too much though.
|
| In USA we have 1) Dragon - an overall good, rather
| conventional, rather modest in capabilities design. We also
| have 2) Lockheed's Orion, a rather capable, but quite, quite
| expensive design. 3) We also have Starliner, and I hope
| Boeing will at least try to support it, or better make it
| reliable enough; it's also rather modest, but much better
| than nothing. 4) We also have Dream Chaser... not quite have
| yet, and it's in cargo version for now, but still there's
| hope it will carry humans one day and will be successful.
| Better than many other designs, and of course not perfect. 5)
| We have Starship... maybe it will carry humans earlier than
| Dream Chaser, but that's still at least years away. It's a
| rather unique design, true. But quite unproven at the moment.
|
| So... the best overall at the moment is still Dragon, and the
| best candidate to replace it is years away - I'd hope that
| would be Dream Chaser, though won't bet on it.
|
| Overall... not too much I'd say. Just imagine yourself in
| place of those several companies which are building orbital
| stations today. What they're going to use?.. Do you see the
| problem?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Most of the companies with actual money behind their space
| station proposals seem to intend to use the IDSS, so
| theoretically they'd be able to take either of the
| commercial crew spacecraft. Besides that, iirc one proposal
| is basically a "basic" cylinder which relies on a docked
| Dragon to support it. Starship is in an interesting spot
| because in a sense it's a station in itself. Starship
| deployable stations currently have the problem that the
| payload bay opening mechanism and volume aren't set in
| stone yet.
| electriclove wrote:
| SpaceX is solving this and many similar issues.
| Archelaos wrote:
| I agree. It reminds me that it is now 6,000+ years (at least)
| since our agricultural era started, and we still haven't
| figured out how to provide a decend meal every day for all the
| children on our spaceship Earth.
| krapp wrote:
| > we still haven't figured out how to provide a decend meal
| every day for all the children on our spaceship Earth.
|
| We produce more than enough food to feed every person on
| Earth and then a few billion more in the future. We simply
| choose not to. It isn't a technological or logistical issue,
| but cultural and political.
| Archelaos wrote:
| Yes indeed. It shows the importance of cultural and
| political issues in everything. And not least in space
| flight. See the motivation behind the Apollo programme in
| the past or who might be part of the next Crew-9 mission in
| the current situation.
| hereme888 wrote:
| we haven't? isn't this exclusively a Boeing issue? SpaceX
| should just get the whole contract.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| SpaceX effectively does already. NASA has already bought
| extra flights from them. It seems likely they'll buy more
| now.
| philwelch wrote:
| This is an absurd statement. There are currently three
| operational spacecraft that have been safely and reliably
| ferrying people back and forth from LEO for years now: Soyuz,
| Dragon, and Shenzhou. This is a test flight for a fourth
| spacecraft.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| You seem to be unaware that the Soyuz system has been safely
| moving people back and forth to LEO for decades. SpaceX has
| been doing it since 2020. This failure should only be taken as
| a comment on Boeing's broken engineering processes and
| incompetent management. It says nothing about our society's
| spacefaring capabilities.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| The same goes for secure and bug free software development
| (while the cost of errors in software rise all the time)
|
| Looking at transportation, noise and air pollution or medicine
| as other examples: We are still just really bad at most things,
| if you consider how little fantasy is required to find major
| fault in our important systems.
|
| Space flight is not even that, just really exposed.
| treflop wrote:
| This is like the difference between electrical engineering and
| software engineering. It's just so more expensive to create and
| test anything in EE so development cycles are much longer.
| Compare that to software engineering where people are trying
| and making new paradigms like every week.
|
| Space engineering is wildly more expensive so development and
| progress cycles are even longer.
| ijidak wrote:
| And that a brand new company offers the only U.S.-based method
| for doing so, when NASA and these other companies have been at
| this since roughly World War II!
|
| It's embarrassing for the legacy space industry.
|
| Not to downplay the legacy space industry's amazing
| achievements like some armchair general (literally typing this
| from my couch...)
|
| But, I'm shocked at how badly SpaceX is beating the incumbents.
| mbStavola wrote:
| We need to nationalize Boeing and get rid of the money men who
| ran this company into the ground.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Nationalized industries have no good record of quality or
| efficiency.
|
| See Chernobyl.
| TMWNN wrote:
| The comment section for the _Washington Post_ article <https
| ://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/24/starlin...>
| reporting on today's news is overflowing with
| anger/despair/grief/denial from anti-Musk, anti-SpaceX
| people. One example:
|
| >For those who "More Engineers and Less MBAs", that's a dog
| whistle - Just so you know, Boeing is the most diversified
| aerospace and aircraft manufacturer in the U.S. Typically,
| Engineers are more arrogant and misogynistic, while MBAs tend
| to be more progressive, though they can also be more driven
| by profit. Want an example? SpaceX is a so called "Engineers
| driven" company.
|
| >At this point, Starliner is actually safe enough (less 1/270
| of failure chance) to bring those 2 astronauts back home. The
| only reason why NASA is not using Starliner, is because there
| is an election 3 months away. NASA administrator (a
| politician) made the final decision, so it's not up to MBA or
| Engineer, it's up to a politician.
|
| >Vote Blue, Nationalize SpaceX and Pass it to Boeing to Run,
| everybody wins except Musk.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > "Engineers are more arrogant and misogynistic, while MBAs
| tend to be more progressive"
|
| Utter bilge. I bet the author knows nothing about engineers
| or running a business.
| FabHK wrote:
| Private industries have no good record of quality or
| efficiency.
|
| See Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Fukushima, Enron, Theranos,
| etc.
|
| With the cheap talking points out of the way, one could
| examine this question carefully and objectively now.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I recommend reading a blow-by-blow account of the causes of
| the Chernobyl disaster, and compare the long list of
| failures and coverups with that of the other disasters you
| mentioned.
| FabHK wrote:
| Any large disaster will be caused by a long list of
| failures. Chernobyl was a particularly colossal screw-up
| (mostly a concatenation of unlucky coincidences, one
| specific instance of ignorance due to political meddling,
| and severe human errors eg by Dyatlov).
|
| But it is preposterous to draw conclusions about state vs
| private enterprises from this N=1 example. There have
| been many successful government-run megaprojects (Panama
| Canal, Dutch North Sea dams, China's high-speed-rail).
| There have been many unsuccessful private ones.
|
| Adjudicating this question would require careful
| enumeration and analysis across many instances, not just
| throwing out one example.
|
| McKinsey, for example, states that megaprojects can fail
| "when big projects cross state or national borders and
| involve a mix of private and government spending."
|
| https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-
| insight...
| WalterBright wrote:
| I have friends who grew up in the Soviet Union. None of
| them have ever mentioned a longing for Soviet quality.
| hereme888 wrote:
| I suggest you walk outside and experience the real world,
| not whatever articles you're reading.
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| So let's get this straight -- the quasi-nationalised Boeing
| fucks up, a private company steps in to save the day, and your
| conclusion is that fully nationalising Boeing is the answer?
| misiti3780 wrote:
| lol - i read it the same way
| andromaton wrote:
| Nasa website still obfuscating.
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-decides-to-bring-star...
|
| Practically nobody was asking "how are they bringing back
| starliner?"
|
| Practically everyone was asking "how are the astronauts
| returning?"
| diggan wrote:
| NASA is focused on the mission, which is the Starliner test
| flight. Macabre, maybe, but someone has to focus on what they
| set out to do.
|
| Obviously, they're not gonna just count out the humans
| involved, but it make sense they want to focus on the core
| mission.
|
| At least that's how I understood it from listening to the press
| conference for the last half hour or so.`
| wiremine wrote:
| I read "A City on Mars" last year, and it opened my eyes to just
| hard space travel is. The government constraints on aerospace
| projects doesn't help. There's a reason SpaceX moves so much
| faster; they don't have to justify and explain things to
| taxpayers.
|
| Beyond that, the book makes a good case for how unrealistic a
| long-term colony on Mars is... at least in the short term (Short
| being the next 50 to 100 years).
|
| My biggest take away is: for all his talk, Musk basically just
| wants to be the Uber to Mars: shuttling people there and back. He
| don't seem serious about _actually_ solving the problems of how
| to stay alive and thrive once we get there.
|
| I found it sort of depressing as first, as I'd love to see people
| loving on Mars in my lifetime. But when I thought about it, I saw
| that they outlined a bunch of really important problems we should
| be working on as a society. The sooner we work on those problems,
| the better.
|
| [1] https://www.acityonmars.com/
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Boeing developed Starliner under the exact same set of
| constraints that SpaceX had for crewed dragon.
| wiremine wrote:
| > Boeing developed Starliner under the exact same set of
| constraints that SpaceX had for crewed dragon.
|
| You could be right. My (limited) understanding is that SpaceX
| is doing most of their R&D internally, and therefore they
| don't have the same oversight requirements more NASA-centric
| projects require. But that was based on an article about
| Artemis, and not Starliner.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| NASA officials have previously admitted to applying more
| oversight to SpaceX than they did to Boeing regarding
| commercial crew. SpaceX's success is in being self-
| motivated. The government money is nice, but they want to
| develop and commercialize the tech anyway and are willing
| to put their own money into it. As evidence we have all the
| private Dragon flights, extra capsules built for free-
| flying missions and their self-developed EVA capability
| that should launch some time in the coming week.
|
| That significantly relaxes the controls compared to Boeing,
| which is structured around exploiting cost-plus
| contracting, so every bit of work needs to be tracked and
| billed, the more time it takes, the better. Starliner was
| fixed price and they had to put in their own money so they
| would've been doing the bare minimum to keep the program
| going. They've only built the bare minimum 2 vehicles
| they'd need to meet contract requirements, and can only
| launch on the few launches reserved on a now retired
| rocket, so no room to commercialize until someone pays them
| to make it work with Vulcan.
| tim333 wrote:
| Well, Boeing seem to have been given about twice the budget,
| not that it helped much.
| NavinF wrote:
| >A City on Mars
|
| That book is full of bad science. Some of the silly claims are
| addressed here: https://planetocracy.org/p/review-of-a-city-on-
| mars-part-ii
| mattmaroon wrote:
| This was the only way this could ever play out. After all of
| Boeing's last five years, even if 100% unrelated, no bureaucrat
| anywhere would take that risk. If something goes wrong, you're
| the idiot who put the astronauts on a vehicle from a company who
| has had a long string of recent failures.
|
| Even at the best of times space travel is risky, why tie your
| career to that?
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| Not only would you be the bureaucrat who put astronauts on a
| vehicle with documented problems, you would have done so when a
| perfectly capable alternative was sitting there able to help.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Elon Musk is a lot like Kelly Johnson (Lockheed Skunkworks). No
| company was ever able to replicate the Skunkworks, though many
| have tried.
|
| I've read biographies of both - well worth reading for anyone who
| wants to read about great Americans.
| vessenes wrote:
| I loved Kelly's memoir; reading his story and how he did what
| he did makes it seem so simple in the telling; looking at the
| many billions wasted by companies trying to get close tells you
| -- not so fast.
|
| I learned in that book that he actually returned money to the
| government for, I think, the U-2 project -- they made a few
| extra planes and had money left over. Amazing.
|
| I'd love to read a longitudinal retrospective of failed
| skunkworks setups and see why participants thought they failed
| -- I bet it's a diverse list of reasons.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Of the ones I learned about, it was because they were going
| to replicate Skunkworks "only better". The latter broke it
| every time.
| vessenes wrote:
| Kelly had a subversive quality to him that is probably
| almost impossible to institutionalize; I think it's unusual
| to find that mixed with some nationalist pride -- in that
| way, I see him as a product of the war, and the postwar
| boom.
|
| That plus his broad multilateral intelligence -- seeing
| design and implementation as one thing that one could
| expect to understand and possibly master -- stood out for
| me, reading about him.
|
| Anyway, if a leader like Kelly is needed for a skunkworks,
| that itself may be quite difficult. I'd guess most large
| companies would take a functioning "almost as good as"
| Skunkworks any day, if they could tolerate the guy/gal
| running it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Kelly was famous for telling the CEO of Lockheed to butt
| out whenever the CEO called him to ask him what he was
| doing.
|
| He was tolerated because he got results. With the size of
| his budget, it would be a very, very rare CEO who would
| tolerate that.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| Which Kelly Biography - I read "Skunkworks". Is there something
| else worth reading?
| WalterBright wrote:
| "Kelly"
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Kelly-More-Than-Share-
| All/dp/08747449...
| credit_guy wrote:
| I wonder if the astronauts get some type of extra-pay for the
| time when they are in space. It feels they they should. If that's
| the case, these 2 astronauts got quite lucky. They were supposed
| to stay only a few days in orbit, and they end up staying a few
| months.
| starik36 wrote:
| They should at least cancel their Netflix subscription.
| hintymad wrote:
| I wonder if there are books or articles that analyze how and why
| Boeing declined so fast and so spectacularly. Boeing used to be
| able to build 747 under budget and ahead of schedule, just like
| Lockheed could dazzle the world by creating U2 ahead of schedule
| and under budget with fewer than 200 people (or < 100?) in 15
| months with the cost of a few millions. It can't be just the
| change of geopolitics post Cold War, right? It can't be just that
| the fixed-margin structure imposed by the government, right? It
| can't be just the mismanagement or the greed of the leadership,
| right? It can't just be that Boeing is in the phase of
| accelerated decline as any old-enough company, right?
|
| I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of
| the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature
| reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got
| entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own
| inevitable decline.
| lysace wrote:
| > I wonder if there are books or articles that analyze how and
| why Boeing declined so fast and so spectacularly.
|
| I'm sure there's a number of books on the topic in the
| publishing pipeline.
|
| > It can't be just the mismanagement or the greed of the
| leadership, right?
|
| It can.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/boeing-737...
| - Gift Link:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/boeing-737...
| (good for 14 days from today)
|
| https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg...
| - 2020 article on the topic
|
| I'm trying to find an article from circa 2007 on the changes at
| Boeing but I can't find it right now. Read those two and follow
| their various links and you'll get more information.
|
| The long story short version is that post McDonnell Douglas
| merger, Boeing's management culture was replaced with MD's
| management culture and things have only declined since.
| adsims2001 wrote:
| Flying Blind by Peter Robison isn't exactly the book you have
| in mind, but I did enjoy it and it's the closest I know of
| dylan604 wrote:
| Wasn't the U2 a skunkworks project where they just did it vs
| opening it up for input from committee whether from corporate
| or bureaucratic? Starliner was far far from that. From day one,
| everyone's fingers were in the pie.
| Laremere wrote:
| I doubt NASA wants to put 4 astronauts on the next Starliner
| flight. So if NASA declares this crewed flight test a failure and
| requires a redo (and possibly even reverting back to a third out
| of one planned uncrewed flight test), Boeing is still on the hook
| for their operational 6 crewed flights.
|
| Here's the problem: Starliner flies in the Atlas 5 rocket. Which
| is officially deprecated and all of the vehicles that will ever
| built have been booked. Which would mean that Boeing has to
| nicely ask Project Kepler for one (or more) or their remaining
| Atlas 5 slots. All of this also pushes back the final flight of
| the Atlas 5. Starliner already has 5 years where it's the only
| mission in that rocket, requiring hardware and operational
| knowledge to be on retainer just for Starliner. At least the pad
| that launches Starliner can also do Vulcan launches, so they
| won't be hogging a launch pad just for this problematic program.
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